Tribe has different take on Columbus holiday

Monday

Oct 14, 2013 at 9:27 PMOct 15, 2013 at 9:45 AM

By Dirk LangeveldFor The Bulletin

When Marisol Long was in elementary school, the story of Columbus Day was a simple one: Christopher Columbus had discovered America. Among the celebrations was a parade featuring the explorer, where children dressed up as Indians and came to offer him gifts. Long's family, descendants of the Taino people who first made contact with Columbus, told a different story. She learned from her father and grandmother that the relationship between Europe and the "New World" was not as rosy as the picture the parade painted. "I knew from the beginning that it was a big lie," she said. Monday marked the first time she has spoken about Columbus Day to children, discussing the holiday with the Mohegan Tribe Recreational Camp Group at the Mohegan Community and Government Center. For five years, Long has been giving presentations on the Taino, who lived in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus' first voyage in 1492. Sandi Pineault, manager of cultural and community programs at the center, said she wanted make the day off from school an "un-Columbus Day." She said many Americans have grown up with the image of Columbus as a heroic discoverer, and that the narrative persists in modern education. Long, a Willimantic resident married to Mohegan Tribe member Shane Long, was invited to give her take on the holiday. "America wasn't discovered at all," Long said. "There were people living on those islands for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. To me, that is not 'discovered.' " Dressed in Taino regalia, Long read an opening prayer and led children in a closing dance. She also shared a number of Taino artifacts made by her family, including instruments, plates, a doll and a fishing spear. She described the Taino as a noble people, with communities eating together as a family at the end of the day. Long said the Taino helped Columbus' sailors after the Santa Maria was wrecked off Haiti. She also said the Taino exchanged gifts with Columbus, but that the present of a gold crown helped spur subsequent European missions to find gold in the islands. "He saw noble people who could be enslaved, a noble people who could work for anything," Long said of Columbus. Long said the Taino suffered years of enslavement, forced to work with little food or water. She said the Europeans sometimes killed the Taino, but stopped short of going into details on some of the offenses. "There's a lot of atrocities that Columbus performed, but we try to gear it to the age group," Pineault said. Catrina Meehin, a 13-year-old St. Bernard School student, said she was taught in school that Columbus discovered America. She said she was fascinated with the presentation on the Taino artifacts. "I thought a lot of the stuff she brought was really cool," Meehin said. "It was similar in a lot of ways to our culture, but different, too."